The Itinerant Archive

From Mondothèque

This walk takes you along the many temporary locations of the Mundaneum archives in Brussels. Following the increasingly dispersed and dwindling collection chronologically through the city, you won't find any explicit traces of its passage. You might discover unknown corners of Brussels though.

Duration: +/- 3hrs

1914: Musée international

Exhibition materials of Le Palais Mondial moved to the hallway to make space for a Rubber Fair (Foire du caoutchouc)

"M. Paul Otlet, director of the Palais Mondial, 'camps' with his colleagues in front of the entrance of the premises that are about to be closed by the Ministry of public works"

Start at Parc du Cinquantenaire 11, Brussels in front of the entrance of Autoworld. In 1914, delayed by World War I the Musée international finally opened here, occupying the left wing of the Cinquantenaire. Walk under the colonnade to your right, and you recognise the former entrance of Le Palais Mondial.

1934: Mundaneum moved to home of Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet à son bureau, avec Georges Lorphèvre et théière

Ruefetis

In 1934, the Mundaneum was closed by the Belgium government to make place for the extension of the Royal Museum of Art and History. An outraged Otlet moved part of the archives to his house at Rue Fetis 44, Brussels.

In 1941, the Germans, seeking to occupy the space in the Palais du Cinquantenaire, in which the collections had remained for so long immured, demanded their removal. Everything except a vast quantity of files on the international associations, which were transferred to Germany because they were assumed to have propaganda value for the German war effort, and some tons of periodicals, which were simply destroyed, was transferred to the Parc Léopold.[4]

Part of an old anatomy building, situated on the edge of the Parc Leopold, that belonged to the Free University of Brussels. This re-location occurred just as the Germans, having ignited the Second World War, overwhelmed Brussels. Restored to some but incomplete order during and after the War, distributed in two large workrooms, in corridors, under stairs, and in attic rooms and a glass-roofed dissecting theatre at the top of the building, this residue gradually fell prey to the dust and damp darkness of the building in its lower regions, and to weather and pigeons admitted through broken panes of glass in the roof in the upper rooms. On the ground floor of the building was a dimly lit, small, steeply-raked lecture theatre. On either side of its dais loomed busts of the founders.[5]

Quantities of documents were lost, destroyed, or stolen in each move. In fact, not one of the thousands of objects contained in the hundred galleries of the Cinquantenaire has survived into the present, not a single maquette, not a single telegraph machine, not a single flag, though there are many photographs of the exhibition rooms.[9]

1985: Musee virtuel

Sitting on the pyramid at Metro Place Rogier, early 2000

The face of the earth would be much altered if brick architecture were ousted everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the earth were adorned with sparkling jewels and enamels. Such glory is unimagmable. We should then have a paradise on earth, and no need to watch in longing expectation for the paradise in heaven.

Metro Place Rogier in 2008

Place Rogier, Brussels around 2005

Place Rogier, Brussels with sign "Pyramides"

Archives of the Mundaneum below Place Rogier, 1990's

Metro Place Roger, Brussels

Les Amis du Palais Mondial transferred the collection to la Communauté française de Belgique.[11]. At the souterrain level at Metro Rogier, at that time adorned by a pyramid that vaguely reminded of it's Parisian variation, Le Centre de lecture publique de la Communauté française was planning to host the collection of The Mundaneum. They took a lease on the place for 30 years but the museum never materialised.

Under the sympathetic guidance of André Canonne was taken over in 1985 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communaute‚ française de Belgique (CLPCF), a government instrumentality centred in Liège. Canonne's objective was to create a research centre around the archives and other papers that remained, an Espace Mundaneum. Unfortunately, the much hoped-for government support for this has not yet materialised.[17]

"The sudden, untimely death of Canonne in 1990 has disrupted what had been the slow realisation of his more general plans for the rehabilitation of the Mundaneum. The fate of the materials which comprise it, especially the wide range of extremely valuable archives that could contribute to a variety of historical studies relating to Belgium, aspects of international intellectual life and the international movement itself, is once more in doubt. History, in some ironic sense, has repeated itself and once again Otlet is its victim."[18]

2009: Google Belgium

Biographers Warden Boyd Rayward, Françoise Levie and Alex Wright at Alex Wright's lecture "Cataloging the world: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age", held in Brussels, at Google Offices, December 4, 2014

The reestablishment of the Mundaneum in Mons as a museum and archive is in my view a major event in the intellectual life of Belgium. Its opening attracted considerable international interest at the time.[23]

Crystal computing

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Crystal computing aka Google in Saint Ghislain, Belgium

Crystal computing by night

GBL 010

Google-datacenter-places-07

Google211

Google71

Elio di Rupo, Rudy Demotte and others playing table football at Google Community Day

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1960's

Les Amis du Palais Mondial meet in a ceremony of remembrance

Annually in this room in the years after Otlet's death until the late 1960's, the busts garlanded with floral wreaths for the occasion, Otlet and La Fontaine's colleagues and disciples, Les Amis du Palais Mondial, met in a ceremony of remembrance. And it was Otlet, theorist and visionary, who held their imaginations most in beneficial thrall as they continued to work after his death, just as they had in those last days of his life, among the mouldering, discorded collections of the Mundaneum, themselves gradually overtaken by age, their numbers dwindling.

1967

Warden Boyd Rayword 'discovers' the archive

Georges Lorphèvre and André Colet were still trying to continue to carry on the work of the Mundaneum with the help of a few now very elderly Amis du Palais Mondial. Every nook and cranny of this building, including the glass-roofed dissecting theatre at the top, were crowded with documents of various kinds, not least piles of copies of the many publication of the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB, then IID then FID) and the Union des Associations Internationales, but also with the seemingly never ending "notes" in typescript and manuscript that Otlet wrote on the multifarious subjects that interested him.